“Imagine if we could begin our little life all over again. Imagine if it was all nothing more than some electronic game. Imagine if I knew then what I know now.” —Deus Ex Machina, Automata, 1984 If videogames can be said to possess an “official history,” it is predicated primarily on the advancement…

[Continuing from my Introduction to Simmel’s Philosophy of Money .] The first part (of six) of Simmel’s Philosophy of Money is the most abstract and the most philosophical. The whole book never quite descends to earth, but it’s at the beginning that he comes closest to Kantian transcendental-style…

Those who today limit themselves to the perception of whatever happens to be visible at that moment miss reality. —Günther Anders 1 As part of the Permanent Copernican Revolution that is modernity, the human senses were increasingly confronted with their limits from the late nineteenth century on,…

From Afrofuturism to the New Weird, nine sci-fi subgenres for understanding what’s to come “Cyberpunk” has been the go-to imagery of the future for a startlingly long time — Bruce Bethke’s short story of that name is 35 years old, and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was released in 1982. We need some…

Artwork by John Coulthart. View more of his work at http://www.johncoulthart.com/index.html by Eugene Thacker Review of Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater, 2017) For a long time, the horror genre was not generally considered worthy of critical, let alone philosophical, reflection; it was…

Ben Wheatley’s film A Field In England : ‘There was something in that landscape that plainly terrified me.’ Photograph: Dean Rogers N inety years ago this spring, MR James published one of his most unsettling ghost stories , “A View from a Hill”. It opens on a hot June afternoon, when a Cambridge…

Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Taylor R. Genovese. Field Notes – September 8, 2016 (Cape Canaveral, Florida): I see the light and smoke first. The radiant fuel pours out of the rocket’s engines and the glow is absolutely blinding—like the brilliant ball of light at the end of a welding tool. I…

Introduction For me, saying white people can't dance has nothing to do with the typical answer that they don't have rhythm. I think the reason for it includes some parts of that, but also something more systemic or structural - race relations and learning cultural contexts. By all of this, I mean to…

Since you mention it, I think I will start that race war. I could’ve swung either way? But now I’m definitely spending the next 4 years converting your daughters to lesbianism; I’m gonna eat all your guns. Swallow them lock stock and barrel and spit bullet casings onto the dinner table; I’ll give…

photo by Julia Serano Any time activists (regardless of affiliation) protest a public speaking event, or the publication of a particular book or article, there will inevitably be claims that such actions threaten “free speech” or constitute “censorship.” Lately, these sorts of claims have been heard…

The twentieth century saw four basic visions of hell on earth, or dystopia. These were: Orwellian . Rule by autocratic totalitarian people, party or elite group. Limitation of choice, repression of speech and repression of minorities. Belief in order, routine and rational-morality. Erotic…

Introduction: There is no term more ubiquitous, obnoxious, and self-serving in our current lexicon as “woke.” Woke is safety-pin politics, masturbatory symbolism, and virtue signaling of a deflated Left insulated by algorithms, filter bubbles, and browser extensions that replace pictures of Donald…

February 19, 2017 Nick Land & Accelerationism Isaac Camacho This is Nick Land, one of the most important philosophers of the last 20 years, and one the most innovative thinkers on the subjects of cybernetics and late capitalism. He is also one of the theorists of NRx, and is one of accelerationism’s…

In his book Foucault, Sa Pensée, Sa Personne , Foucault’s friend Paul Veyne writes that he was unclassifiable, politically and philosophically: “He believed in neither Marx nor Freud, nor in the Revolution nor in Mao, in private he snickered at fine progressive sentiments, and I knew of no…

Science Fiction Studies #42 = Volume 14, Part 2 = July 1987 Samuel R. Delany The Semiology of Silence The following text began as a conversation that took place in New York City (in August of 1983) between Samuel R. Delany and Sinda Gregory and Larry McCaffery (both from San Diego State University).…

Many of you are familiar, I should think, with the Sanzhi Pod City near New Taipei City in Taiwan. This future city was late for its own birth, which was in 1978. Originally planned as a vacation resort for US soldiers, the project was doomed by a series of mysterious car accidents, and abandoned in…

P erhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be indistinguishable from magic. If you dropped in on a bunch of Paleolithic farmers with your iPhone and a pair of sneakers, you’d undoubtedly seem pretty…

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This piece appeared in the Fall 1996 issue of Absolute Magnitude . We live at the very beginning of the Universe. As we peer back with our telescopes toward the beginning of time, and measure the age of the universe, we are beginning to find that the universe is closer to ten billion years old than…

25 Reblog “We shall sodomize your sons, emblems of your feeble masculinity, of your shallow dreams and vulgar lies. We shall seduce them in your schools, in your dormitories, in your gymnasiums, in your locker rooms, in your sports arenas, in your seminaries, in your youth groups, in your movie…

I just came across another manifestation of imposter syndrome, in the form of “Am I really a developer or just a good googler?” The answer I read missed the point, so I’m going to break this mess down, because too many people are afraid for no good reason. The fact that information is easy to find…

1. Facing History: Modernity as Prefix It is a hallmark of postcolonial theory to question selective, self-flattering accounts of European modernity. Postcolonial theorists from both Europe and the rest of the world have illustrated how ideals of emancipation, equality, freedom, and scientific and…

At the very end of his playful Postscript to The Name of the Rose (1980) , Umberto Eco made a casually sibylline gesture toward the future of interactive fiction. “It seems,” Eco wrote, “that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has…

T HE MULTIPLE, REMARKABLE crises consuming Brazil are now garnering substantial Western media attention . That’s understandable given that Brazil is the world’s fifth most populous country and eighth-largest economy; its second-largest city, Rio de Janeiro, is the host of this year’s Summer…

Proposals Toward the End of Writing By Tony Tulathimutte I. The Solution to Cliché …whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove—there is an opportunity for the machine. —Vannevar Bush Some writers morbidly fixate on computer interference in their working lives: it’s a distraction, an…

Introducer: Anyway, I believe I've killed enough time ... so, ladies and gentlemen, aperson who in this crowd needs absolutely no introduction, Cory Doctorow! [Audience applauds.] Doctorow: 27.0 Thank you. 32.0 So, when I speak in places where the first language of the nation isnot English, there is…

Last month, at long last, we enjoyed Back to the Future Day — the day to which Marty McFly travels in 1989’s Back to the Future Part II . It’s a kind of death sentence for our era: we’re all living in the future now; the time in which things might have changed has passed, and all the possibilities…

Dave Young writes within the context of Localhost: RWX, a symposium and worksession at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop from 29-31 October 2015. For more information about RWX, visit the Localhost website . RWX is funded by Creative Scotland, with support from New Media Scotland, Furtherfield, and…

The problem of the end of the world is always formulated as a separation or divergence, a divorce or orphaning resulting from the disappearance of one pole in the duality of world and inhabitant—the beings whose world it is. In our metaphysical tradition, this being tends to be the “human,” whether…

What is an author? Michel Foucault *This essay is the text of a lecture presented to the Societé Francais de philosophie on 22 February 1969 (Foucault gave a modified form of the lecture in the United States in 1970). This translation by Josué V. Harari has been slightly modified. The coming into…

Idle Words > Talks > Web Design: The First 100 Years This is the expanded version of a talk I gave on September 9, 2014 , at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC. Designers! I am a San Francisco computer programmer, but I come in peace! I would like to start with a parable about…

In 1995, Harper's Magazine sent David Foster Wallace on a Caribbean cruise in the hope that he would discover something about what Americans like to do for fun. He reported back : A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem…

Provided Meaningless to humans, these images are recognized by a computer wiith great certainty as common objects. The white noise versions on top and pattern versions below were created by slightly different methods. Computers are learning to recognize objects with near-human ability. But Cornell…

Living under permanent surveillance and what that means for our freedom Ai Weiwei Ai Weiwei has been living in our future. His movements are restricted and he is structurally being watched by the government. He lives in a world without privacy. A world without privacy is a world without freedom. He…

In Praise of Idleness ByBertrand Russell [1932] Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present…

'Screaming into space' … Galina Ustvolskaya. Photograph: ustvolskaya.org It has the “narrowness of a laser beam which is capable of piercing metal”; it’s a “voice from the ‘Black Hole’ of Leningrad, the epicentre of communist terror, the city that suffered so terribly the horrors of war”; it “burns…

78 Reblog Until I Died we found this kid on scruff when he was visiting home. it was early in our relationship and I was still entertaining high minded ideas about alternative relationship structures and brad had recently told me that he liked me because, when we started dating, he knew that I was…

To the eternal whine of the superannuated free-range SF geek ("dude, where's my jet pack? Where's my holiday on the moon? Where are my food pills? I thought this was supposed to be the 21st century!") can be added an appendix: "and what about those L5 orbital space colonies the size of Manhattan?"…

It is vitally important that we all realize this and move on. People (eg Bloggers) go on and on about how wonderful it is. About how much information is out there in cyberspace. About the way that everything is within reach in just a few clicks of their mice. For instance: "If I can operate Google,…

By John Harris [ This feature takes a look at cellular automation, an algorithmic simulation useful in games, and discusses its use in titles like Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress, as well as other examples, and explains how it can be useful in the context of a game in development .] What is cellular…